Kreisler was ingrainedly antiquated6, purer German. He had experienced suddenly home-sickness, that often overtakes voluntary exiles at the turn of their life—his being, not for Germany, exactly, but for the romantic, stiff ideals of the German student of his generation. It was a home-sickness for his early self. Like knack7 of riding a bicycle or anything learnt in youth, this character was easily assumed. He was gradually discovering the foundations of his personality. Many previous moods and phases of his nature were mounting to the surface.
Arrived in front of the Café Berne, he stood for fifteen minutes looking up and down the street, at the pavement, his watch, the passers-by. Then he chose the billiard-room door to avoid the principal one, where he usually entered.
All the ugly familiarity of this place, he hated with methodic, deliberate hatred8; taking things one by one, as it were, persons and objects. The gar?on’s spasmodic running about was like a gnat’s energy over stagnation9.
Passing from the billiard-room to a gangway with several tables, his dull, exasperated10 eye fell on something it did not understand. How could it be expected[113] to understand? It was an eye and it stuck. It was simple, though. It was amazed and did not understand.
Anastasya.
Set in the heart of this ennui11, it arrested the mind like a brick wall some carter drowsed on his wagon12. Stopping dead, Kreisler stared stupidly. Anastasya was sitting there with Soltyk. With Soltyk! He seemed about to speak to them—they, at least, were under this impression. Quite naturally he was about to do this, like a child. As though in intense abstraction, he fixed13 his eyes on them. Then he took a step towards them, possibly with the idea of sitting down beside them. Consciousness set in, with a tropic tide of rage, and carried him at a brisk pace towards the door, corresponding to the billiard-room door, on the other side of the café. Yet in the midst of this he instinctively14 raised his hat a little, his eyes fixed now on his feet.
He was in a great hurry to get past the two people sitting there. This could not be done without discovering two inches of the scalp for a moment—as an impatient man in a crush, wishing to pass, pushes another aside, raising his hat at the same time to have the right to be rude.
Same table on terrasse as an hour before. But Kreisler seemed sitting on air, or one of those wooden whirling platforms in the fêtes.
The gar?on, with a femininely pink, virile15 face which, in a spirit of fun, he kept constantly wooden and solemn except when, having taken your order, he winked16 or smiled—came up hastily.
“Was wünschen Sie?” he asked, wiping the table with a serviette. He had learned a few words of German from the customers. Supposing Kreisler rather a touchy17 man, he always attempted to put him at his ease, as the running of bills was valuable to him. He had confidence in this client, and wished the bill to assume vague and profitable proportions.
Kreisler’s thoughts dashed and stunned18 themselves against this waiter. His mind stood stock-still for[114] several minutes. This pink wooden face paralysed everything. As its owner thought “the young man” was having a joke with him, it became still more humorously wooden. The more wooden it became, the more paralysed became Kreisler’s intelligence. He stared at him more and more oddly, till the gar?on was forced to laugh. As a matter of fact, Kreisler mentally was steadying himself on this hard personality. As he had appeared to walk deliberately19 with hot intention to his seat, so he seemed gazing deliberately at the waiter and choosing his drink. Then the dam gave way. He hated this familiar face; his thought smashed and buffeted20 it. Such commercial modicum21 of astute22 good nature was too much. It was kindness that only equilibrium23 could ignore. The expression of his own face became distorted. The gar?on fixed him with his eye and took a step back, with dog-like doubt, behind the next table.
Anastasya had smiled in a very encouraging way as he passed. This had offended him extremely. Soltyk—Anastasya; Soltyk—Anastasya. That was a bad coupling! His sort of persecution24 mania25 seized him by the throat. This had done it! Soltyk, who had got hold of Volker and was the something that had interfered26 between that borrowable quantity and himself, occupied a position not unsimilar to his stepmother. Volker and his father, who had kept him suspended in idleness, and who now both were withdrawing or had withdrawn27 like diminishing jets of water, did not attract the full force of his indolent, tragic29 grumpiness.
Behind Ernst and his parent Soltyk and his stepmother stood.
A certain lonely and comic ego30 all people carry about with them, who is always dumb except when they get drunk or become demented. It then talks, never sincerely, but in a sort of representative, pungent31 way. This ego in Kreisler’s case would not have been shameless and cynical32 if it had begun to grumble33 about Volker. It would have said, “Hang that little[115] Ernst! I come to Paris, I am ashamed to say, partly for him. But the little swine-dog has given me the go-by. Hell take his impudence34! I don’t like that swine-dog Soltyk! He’s a slimy Russian rascal35!” It would not have said: “I’ve lost the access to Ernst’s pocket. The pig-dog Soltyk is sitting there!”
In any case his vanity too was hurt.
Anastasya now provided him with an acceptable platform from which his vexation might spring at Soltyk. There was no money or insignificant36 male liaison37 to stuff him down into grumpiness. “Das Weib” was there. All was in order for unbounded inflammation.
He wanted to bury his fear in her hot hair; he wanted to kiss her lips as he had never kissed any woman’s; all the things he wanted—! But what would Soltyk be doing about it? He had met her alone, and that was all right and not impossible with a world made by their solitary38 meeting in the restaurant. He had lived with her instinctively in this solitary world of he and she. It was quite changed at present. Soltyk had got into it. Soltyk, by implication, brought a host of others, even if he did not mean that he was a definite rival there himself. What was he saying to her now? Sneers39 and ridicule40, oceans of sneers directed at himself, more than ten thousand men could have discharged, he felt, certainly were inundating41 her ear. His stepmother-fiancée, other tales, were being retailed42. Everything that would conceivably prejudice Anastasya, or would not, he accepted as already retailed. There he sat, like a coward. He was furious at their distant insulting equanimity43.
A breath of violent excitement struck him, coming from within. He stirred dully beneath it. She was there; he had only put a thin partition between them. His heart beat slowly and ponderously44. “On hearing what the swine Soltyk has to say she will remember my conduct in the restaurant and my appearance. She will make it all fit in. And, by[116] God, it does fit in! Himmel! Himmel! there’s nothing to be done! Anything I did, every movement, would only be filling out the figure my ass-tricks have cut for her!”
He was as conscious of the interior, which he could not see from his place on the street, as though, passing through, he had just found the walls, tables, chairs, painted bright scarlet45. He felt he had left a wake of seething46 agitation47 in his passage of the café. Passing the two people inside there had been the affair of a moment, not yet grasped. This experience, apparently48 of the past, was still going on. The sense’s picture, even, was not yet complete. New facts, details, were added every moment. He was still passing Anastasya and Soltyk. He sat on, trembling, at the door. There were other exits. She might be gone. But he forgot about them.
How he had worried himself about the pawned49 suit. Fate had directed him there to the café to save him the trouble of further racking his brains about it. Should he leave Paris? But he was mutinous50. The occurrence of this idea filled him with suspicions.
The fit was over; reaction had set in. He was eyeing himself obliquely51 in the looking-glass behind his head.
He almost jumped away at two voices beside him, and the thrilling sound of a dress; it was as though some one had spoken with his own voice. It seemed all round him, attacking him. The thin, ordinary brushing of a skirt was like the low breathing of a hidden animal to a man in the forest. He felt they were coming to speak to him—just as they had thought that he was. The nerves on that side of his head twitched52 as though shrinking from a touch.
They were crossing the terrasse to the street. His heart beat a slow march. Her image there had become used. The reality, in its lightning correction of this, dug into his mind. There once more the real figure had its separate and foreign life. He was disagreeably struck by a certain air of depression and cheerlessness in the two figures before him. This[117] one thing that should have been pleasant, displeased53 him. He was angry as though she had been shamming54 melancholy55.
They were not talking, the best proof of familiarity. A strange figure occurred to him; he felt like a man, with all organs, bones, tissues complete, but made of cheap perishable56 stuff, who could only live for a day and then die of use.
This image, reality now before him, had drawn28 out all his energy, like a distinct being nourished by him. The image, intact in his mind, had returned him more or less the vigour57 spent. Her listlessness seemed a complement58 of the weakness he now felt. Energy was ebbing59 away from both.
He stared with bloodshot eyes. Then he got up and began walking after her. Soltyk, on hearing steps, turned round; but he made no remark to Anastasya. They crossed the street and got into a passing tram. Otto Kreisler went back to the café.
It was like returning to some hall where there had been a banquet to find empty chairs, empty bottles, and disorder60. The vacant seats around seemed to have been lately vacated. Then there was the sensation of being left behind. The Café Berne was a solitary and antediluvian61 place. Everything began to thrust itself upon him—the people, street, insignificant incidents—as though this indifferent life of facts, in the vanishing of the life of the imagination, had now become important, being the only thing left. Common life seemed rushing in and claiming him, and emphasizing his defeat and the new condition thus inaugurated. He went to Lejeune’s for dinner. During the whole day he had been in feverish62 hurry, constantly seeing time narrowing in upon him. Now he had a sensation of intolerable leisure.
The useless ennui of his life presented itself to him for the thousandth time, but now clearly. This fact seemed to have been waiting with irritating calm, as though to say, “As soon as you can give me your attention?—Well, what are you going to do with me?” For he had compromised himself irretrievably.[118] He knew that sooner or later he must marry and settle down with this stony63 fact, multiply its image. Things had gone too far.
And how about his father? What was that letter going to contain? His father had got a certain amount of pleasure out of him. Otto had satisfied in him in turn the desire of possession (that objects such as your watch, your house, which could equally well belong to anybody, do not satisfy), of authority (that servants do not satisfy), of self-complacency (that self does not): had been to him, later, a kind of living cinematograph and travel-book combined; and, finally, had inadvertently lured64 with his youth a handsome young woman into the paternal65 net. But he knew that he could procure66 no further satisfaction to this satiated parent. He could be henceforth a source only of irritation67 and expense.
After dinner he walked along the boulevard. The dark made him adventurous68. He peered into cafés as he passed. He noticed it was already eight. Supposing he should meet some of the women on the way to Fr?ulein Lipmann’s? He made a movement as though to turn down a side-street and hide himself at thought of possible confrontation69. Next moment he was walking on obstinately70 in the direction of the Lipmann’s house. His weakness drew him on, back into the vortex. Anything, death, and annihilation, was better than going back into that terrible colourless mood. His room, the café, waited for him like executioners. He had escaped from it for a time. Late agitations71 had given him temporary freedom, to which he was now committed. Dressed as he was, extremely untidy, he would go to Fr?ulein Lipmann’s flat. Only humiliation72 he knew awaited him in that direction. If Anastasya were there (he would have it that she would be found wherever he least would care to see her) then anything might happen. But he wanted to suffer still more by her; physically73, as it were, under her eyes. That would be a relief from present suffering. He must look in her eyes; he must excite in her the maximum of contempt and[119] dislike. He wanted to be in her presence again, with full consciousness that his mechanical idyll was barred by Fate. Not strong enough to leave things as they were, he could not go away with this incomplete and, physically, uncertain picture behind him. It was as though a man had lost a prize and wanted written and stamped statement that he had lost it. He wished to shame her. If he did not directly insult her, he would at least insult her by thrusting himself on her. Then, at height of her disgust, he would pretend again to make advances.
As to the rest of the party, a sour glee possessed74 him at thought of their state by the time he had done with them. He already saw their faces in fancy when he should ring their bell and present himself, old morning suit, collar none too clean, dusty boots. All this self-humiliation and suffering he was preparing for himself was wedded75 with the thought of retaliation76. Kreisler’s schooldays could have supplied him with a parallel if he could have thought just then. He saw a curious scene proceeding77 beneath a desk in class. The boy next to him had jabbed his neighbour in the hand with a penknife. The latter, pale with fury, held his hand out in sinister78 invitation, hissing79, “Do it again! do it again!” The boy next to Kreisler complied. “Do it again!” came still fiercer. He seemed to want to see his hand a mass of wounds and delect himself with the awful feeling of his own rage. Kreisler did not know how he should wipe out this debt with the world, but he wanted it bigger, more crushing. The bitter fascination80 of suffering drew him on to substitute real wounds for imaginary.
Near Fr?ulein Lipmann’s house he rubbed his shoulder against a piece of whitewashed81 wall with a grin. He went rapidly up the stairs leading to her flat on the entresol, considering a scheme for the commencement of the evening. This seemed so happy that he felt further resourcefulness in misconduct would not be wanting.
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1
ebbed
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| （指潮水）退( ebb的过去式和过去分词 )； 落； 减少； 衰落 | |
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monotonously
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| adv.单调地，无变化地 | |
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desolate
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| adj.荒凉的，荒芜的；孤独的，凄凉的；v.使荒芜，使孤寂 | |
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chatter
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| vi.／n.喋喋不休；短促尖叫；(牙齿)打战 | |
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speculative
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| adj.思索性的，暝想性的，推理的 | |
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antiquated
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| adj.陈旧的，过时的 | |
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knack
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| n.诀窍，做事情的灵巧的，便利的方法 | |
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hatred
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| n.憎恶，憎恨，仇恨 | |
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stagnation
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| n. 停滞 | |
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exasperated
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| adj.恼怒的 | |
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ennui
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| n.怠倦，无聊 | |
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wagon
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| n.四轮马车，手推车，面包车；无盖运货列车 | |
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fixed
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| adj.固定的，不变的，准备好的；(计算机)固定的 | |
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instinctively
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| adv.本能地 | |
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virile
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| adj.男性的；有男性生殖力的；有男子气概的；强有力的 | |
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16
winked
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| v.使眼色( wink的过去式和过去分词 )；递眼色（表示友好或高兴等）；（指光）闪烁；闪亮 | |
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touchy
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| adj.易怒的；棘手的 | |
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stunned
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| adj. 震惊的，惊讶的 动词stun的过去式和过去分词 | |
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deliberately
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| adv.审慎地；蓄意地；故意地 | |
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buffeted
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| 反复敲打( buffet的过去式和过去分词 )； 连续猛击； 打来打去； 推来搡去 | |
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modicum
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| n.少量，一小份 | |
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astute
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| adj.机敏的，精明的 | |
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equilibrium
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| n.平衡，均衡，相称，均势，平静 | |
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persecution
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| n. 迫害,烦扰 | |
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mania
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| n.疯狂；躁狂症，狂热，癖好 | |
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interfered
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| v.干预( interfere的过去式和过去分词 )；调停；妨碍；干涉 | |
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27
withdrawn
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| vt.收回；使退出；vi.撤退，退出 | |
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28
drawn
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| v.拖，拉，拔出；adj.憔悴的，紧张的 | |
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tragic
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| adj.悲剧的，悲剧性的，悲惨的 | |
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ego
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| n.自我，自己，自尊 | |
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pungent
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| adj.（气味、味道）刺激性的，辛辣的；尖锐的 | |
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32
cynical
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| adj.(对人性或动机)怀疑的，不信世道向善的 | |
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grumble
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| vi.抱怨；咕哝；n.抱怨，牢骚；咕哝，隆隆声 | |
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impudence
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| n.厚颜无耻；冒失；无礼 | |
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rascal
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| n.流氓；不诚实的人 | |
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36
insignificant
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| adj.无关紧要的，可忽略的，无意义的 | |
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liaison
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| n.联系，（未婚男女间的）暖昧关系，私通 | |
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solitary
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| adj.孤独的，独立的，荒凉的；n.隐士 | |
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39
sneers
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| 讥笑的表情（言语）( sneer的名词复数 ) | |
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40
ridicule
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| v.讥讽，挖苦；n.嘲弄 | |
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41
inundating
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| v.淹没( inundate的现在分词 )；（洪水般地）涌来；充满；给予或交予（太多事物）使难以应付 | |
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42
retailed
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| vt.零售（retail的过去式与过去分词形式） | |
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43
equanimity
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| n.沉着，镇定 | |
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44
ponderously
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45
scarlet
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| n.深红色，绯红色，红衣；adj.绯红色的 | |
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46
seething
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| 沸腾的，火热的 | |
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47
agitation
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| n.搅动；搅拌；鼓动，煽动 | |
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48
apparently
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| adv.显然地；表面上，似乎 | |
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49
pawned
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| v.典当，抵押( pawn的过去式和过去分词 )；以（某事物）担保 | |
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50
mutinous
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| adj.叛变的，反抗的；adv.反抗地，叛变地；n.反抗，叛变 | |
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51
obliquely
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| adv.斜； 倾斜； 间接； 不光明正大 | |
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52
twitched
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| vt.& vi.（使）抽动，（使）颤动（twitch的过去式与过去分词形式） | |
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53
displeased
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| a.不快的 | |
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54
shamming
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| 假装，冒充( sham的现在分词 ) | |
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55
melancholy
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| n.忧郁，愁思；adj.令人感伤（沮丧）的，忧郁的 | |
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56
perishable
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| adj.（尤指食物）易腐的，易坏的 | |
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57
vigour
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| （=vigor）n.智力，体力，精力 | |
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58
complement
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| n.补足物，船上的定员；补语；vt.补充，补足 | |
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59
ebbing
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| （指潮水）退( ebb的现在分词 )； 落； 减少； 衰落 | |
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60
disorder
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| n.紊乱，混乱；骚动，骚乱；疾病，失调 | |
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61
antediluvian
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| adj.史前的，陈旧的 | |
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62
feverish
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| adj.发烧的，狂热的，兴奋的 | |
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63
stony
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| adj.石头的，多石头的，冷酷的，无情的 | |
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64
lured
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| 吸引，引诱（lure的过去式与过去分词形式） | |
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65
paternal
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| adj.父亲的，像父亲的，父系的，父方的 | |
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66
procure
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| vt.获得，取得，促成；vi.拉皮条 | |
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67
irritation
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| n.激怒，恼怒，生气 | |
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68
adventurous
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| adj.爱冒险的；惊心动魄的，惊险的，刺激的 | |
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69
confrontation
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| n.对抗，对峙，冲突 | |
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70
obstinately
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| ad.固执地，顽固地 | |
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71
agitations
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| （液体等的）摇动( agitation的名词复数 )； 鼓动； 激烈争论； （情绪等的）纷乱 | |
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72
humiliation
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| n.羞辱 | |
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73
physically
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| adj.物质上，体格上，身体上，按自然规律 | |
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74
possessed
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| adj.疯狂的；拥有的，占有的 | |
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wedded
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| adj.正式结婚的；渴望…的，执著于…的v.嫁，娶，（与…）结婚( wed的过去式和过去分词 ) | |
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76
retaliation
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| n.报复，反击 | |
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proceeding
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| n.行动，进行，(pl.)会议录，学报 | |
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78
sinister
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| adj.不吉利的，凶恶的，左边的 | |
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79
hissing
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| n. 发嘶嘶声, 蔑视 动词hiss的现在分词形式 | |
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80
fascination
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| n.令人着迷的事物，魅力，迷恋 | |
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81
whitewashed
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| 粉饰，美化，掩饰( whitewash的过去式和过去分词 ) | |
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